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Breeding by numbers Dumfries and Galloway Standard August 2008
Like so many of the other shows in the South West this year Colmonell Agricultural Show, on Saturday, fell victim to the monsoon season, But, despite the torrential rain that was falling when I left my yard that morning I was happy to set out, with my animals, on the twenty mile trip to support the show. The committee, that organise the show, put a great effort into the day and my wife and I both feel that their effort should be rewarded by turning up to swell the crowd. The only problem was that my conscience was giving me jip because a technician from Signet Breeding Services was coming that day to record the weights and scan our lambs for back-fat and muscle depth. Janet was left with the work to do – as usual! As I made my way over the hill road to Colmonell I couldn’t help but think that I had got my priorities wrong by snubbing the high-tech world of ultrasound scanners and computers in favour of attending a show that is held together with string and community spirit. However, by the time the judging at the show commenced the sun had started to peep through the clouds and all thoughts of Janet pushing obstinate Beltex ram lambs into a weigh-crate had been completely erased from my thoughts. I had started collecting data myself - the old fashioned way using my very low tech ears and eyes to store snippets of information onto a hard drive in my head that seems harder to access with every day that passes and is prone to crash with ever increasing regularity…Ian McMillan’s Beltex are very good again, I must ask him if they’re off his good stock ram; Alex Brown’s mules have won the championship, his tups will be worth a look at the sales this year; the wool on those Texel lambs feels a bit soft I wonder how they’re bred? These types of records were stored away during a very pleasant day spent amongst friends in beautiful setting in the South Ayrshire countryside. I suspect that most of those superb animals that I saw at Colmonell show that day had been the product of a breeding program that had involved stockmen analysing little snippets of information that they had gathered up at shows like Colmonell in the course of a year. All of this is, of course, frowned on by every puffed up advisor who is fit to draw breath and influence the industry. Their problem is that they don’t understand how breeding animals, by using your own judgment, works. It’s not something that can be learned from a book or bought to run on a computer like a piece of software. So, predictably, they pour scorn on the whole concept as being nothing short of witchcraft and advise the use of statistics, instead, to formulate modern breeding programs. These statistics are collected by technicians using computers and ultrasound scanners. The noise of clanking gates during this process is only broken by the utterance of yet more numbers read from the scales to be entered into the computer. Then, when all of the numbers have been entered, a number crunching mind boggling formulae is applied to the statistics which ranks the animals in order of merit and prints off a list to study at your leisure. On returning from the show I looked at the list that was left by the technician who had scanned my lambs while I was away. Then I went and looked at the actual animals that appeared on the top of the list. It was at this point I decided that, I will be going back to Colmonell show next year to gather more information. I think Janet might come with me. |